It was during a three-year stint in Chicago, working for market maker Optiver, that Matt Leibowitz realised Australians were getting gouged buying international equities through the brokerages owned by the big banks and the customer experience was woeful.

"During my years in the US I was amazed at the breadth of product offered to US investors at a compelling price," said Mr Leibowitz, who was a lawyer at Allens before joining Optiver in 2007. "I was shocked at the breadth and costs in Australia: we paid more and got less."

Returning to Australia four years ago, Mr Leibowitz started to sense an opportunity to start a fintech that would provide access to US equities and various exchange traded funds (ETFs) at a much lower cost and with an intuitive and accessible e-commerce style customer experience.

The culmination of his thinking is Stake, an online broker which allows customers to buy 2200 stocks or exchange traded funds (ETFs), including well-known names such as Tesla, Google, Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Alibaba, Netflix, Berkshire Hathaway, Atlassian and Twitter. The ETFs provide access to various commodities, currencies or trends such as market volatility. A further 900 stocks and ETFs will be added soon.

Creating a shop for international shares isn't as simple as an Amazon or eBay given the complexities of financial services regulation. Yet Stake has cemented relationships with US broker-dealer DriveWealth, foreign exchange provider OFX (formerly OzForex) and Macquarie, which supplies Stake's customers with cash management accounts to facilitate trading.

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"We've partnered with like-minded companies and repackaged it back into one seamless platform which is a whole lot cheaper, end to end," Mr Leibowitz said.

Fully digitised

Stake has also digitised the whole investment process, including the infamous W8BEN forms for the US tax office, which normally take days for clients to get through.

A trade through Stake costs a minimum of $US5.99 then US2¢ per share. It reckons a $US15,000 trade would cost $149.95 through National Australia Bank, $238 through ANZ or Westpac and $82 through CommSec – but $18.49 via Stake. The start-up is targeting the market of 30- to 45-year-olds as they start to think harder about their superannuation.

The high costs of trading international stocks through the banks reflects big fees and additional costs charged through the FX spread which can be between 0.5 per cent and 1 per cent of the dollar amount of each trade. OFX is providing Stake's clients with a FX rate much closer to that provided to institutions.

"We set up Stake to give investors great access to better opportunities at the right price to help them generate better returns. On the FX side, this means reducing the cost of transferring money overseas, so more of it can be used to invest," Mr Leibowitz said. "While banks have been used to many customers coming to them for this advice, which allows them to monetise their existing customer base, we don't have that benefit. So, we need to provide the best user experience in the world. If they like it, customers will come."

Easy to dig

Searching for US equities on the site is akin to searching for a house on Domain: a range of filters can be applied to dig into the market. For example, a filter by women CEOs displays Hewlett Packard Enterprises, IBM, Oracle, General Motors, Pepsi, Yahoo and Lockheed Martin. (All have delivered double-digital annual returns in the past year.)

Users can see what legendary investor Warren Buffet owns, or "bet against the US president". The site also has a feature allowing shares to be gifted, while fractionalised share purchases allow an even dollar amount to be invested.

The other co-founders are chief operations officer Dan Silver, who has 11 years' experience in strategy and operations, and Jon Abitz, who has been a software engineer specialising in algorithm development for 15 years.

At present, Stake's offices, in central Sydney, are filled with mostly empty cubicles; the fintech has taken out a lease in the former offices of Menulog, Australia's largest online food ordering platform.